Into The Storm The Story Of Flight 191

The co-pilot was Rudy Price. He was glad to be back in the cockpit. He had spent much of that week behind the wheel of a car, driving from his sister`s house in New Jersey to his home in Lithonia, Ga.

Like Connors, the co-pilot was long on experience. Price, 42, had flown for Delta since 1970 and logged 6,500 hours in the air. He had helped rewrite the Delta L-1011 Pilot`s Manual.

Price would be the one actually flying the jet to Dallas. Connors would work the radio. After landing in Dallas, Connors would take over and fly to Los Angeles. The switch-off was routine Delta procedure.

The flight engineer on Delta 191, who would monitor all the aircraft`s automatic systems, was Nick Nassick, 43. Also from Georgia, Nassick had flown for Delta for nine years. L-1011s accounted for more than two-thirds of his 6,500 hours in the air.

All three men had, during recurrent training in the last year, viewed a film called The Probable Cause. It gave them tips on spotting microbursts, violent wind explosions known generally as wind shears.

Connors scanned the pilot`s weather forecast for Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. It was marked ``NF,`` meaning weather was ``no factor.`` There was, however, notice of an area of isolated thunderstorms expected over Oklahoma and northeastern Texas.

WHEN BOB KATZ ARRIVED AT THE Delta gate with his wife, Debbie, he was annoyed. They were heading for San Francisco and Los Angeles. The trip was their first real vacation since their honeymoon 12 years before, and they wanted everything to be first class.

But it wasn`t. The travel agent had reserved seats for them on Flight 191 in the wrong smoking section. Bob wanted smoking in first class. Instead their boarding tickets said 42H and 42J, the back of the plane.

That irritated Bob. Things weren`t starting out right. He and Debbie had struggled for years to build the life they now had and the home they shared with four children in Lauderhill. In the last few years things had gone from good to great. Bob was the president of an investment firm with 75 brokers under him. He and Debbie had strung long weekends together over the years, but never took a real vacation. This was it. Ten days in California. Visiting friends, sightseeing, playing golf. It had to be done right.

``Can I get these tickets changed to first class?`` he asked the gate agent.

The man looked at the crowd of passengers still waiting to check in and told Katz he would have to wait until the line thinned out. Bob and Debbie sat down.

Besides the wrong seats, another thing bothered Bob. He and his wife would have to change planes in Dallas to get to San Francisco. He had wanted a direct flight. He worried that their luggage would get lost, and he needed his golf clubs. He was going to play at Pebble Beach.

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Mike and Marilyn Steinberg were headed for San Francisco, too, but it wasn`t their first choice. Originally, they had planned to go to Scandinavia. But there had been so many hijackings. So many bomb threats. To play it safe, Mike, an insurance agent, and Marilyn, an artist, traded in their tickets for a trip to California.

Now they stepped up to the gate agent to confirm the reservation for Marilyn`s window seat on Delta`s Flight 191. Marilyn always has a window seat. Their travel agent booked it automatically. This time something had gone wrong.

``I`m sorry,`` the ticket agent told them as he checked and re-checked the seating chart. All the window seats in the smoking section were taken and their name was not among the reservations.

``But the flight isn`t full,`` the agent explained, ``so if I book you on an aisle seat, you can probably rearrange your seating once the plane is in the air.``

Mike looked at Marilyn and she shrugged.

``OK, that`s fine,`` Mike told the agent, accepting seats 44C and 44D. They picked up their carry-on bags and joined the other passengers who were waiting to board.

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The 125-ton jumbo jet Ted Connors was captaining could carry 302 passengers and a crew of 11. This flight would carry 163 people.

At the airport gate, Connors OK`d the pumping of 8,000 gallons of fuel into the plane`s 70-foot-long wings. With the fuel, passengers, crew and cargo, the aircraft would weigh a total of 187 tons when it took off and banked over the ocean.

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Jay Slusher rushed to catch Flight 191 even though he had plenty of time to make the plane. The American Express computer wizard was heading home to Phoenix after two days of meetings at the company`s data center in Plantation. Slight and soft-spoken, he was the kind of executive who did everything by the rules and well in advance. Lugging his briefcase down the aisle, Slusher found his way to smoking-section seat 42C, on the left-side aisle. It annoyed him that his dozen or so past flights out of Fort Lauderdale had never left on time. This one looked like it would.